Erasmus+

2.2. WORKSHOPS 2.2. WORKSHOPS TITLE
technology has advanced: digital tools and social media, all with near global reach, have become available
and, for some, indispensable.
The scope for dialogue within common frames of reference has thus expanded enormously during the
lifetime of Erasmus Mundus. Future conferences could usefully focus on strategies of consortial teambuilding:
the extent of common ground (discipline, pedagogic culture and style, research, language); the degree of
complementarity; the human resource implications.
Employability
The conference workshop acknowledged that the interface of higher education with commerce and industry
continues to pose problems, but here too it stressed that the situation had moved on significantly since the
launch of Erasmus Mundus.
When the first cohorts of students enrolled, they could not know that they would graduate in the aftermath
of a global financial crisis, in which rates of graduate unemployment would be high. By and large, they did
not study in institutions which set great store by student-centred learning and competence-based curricula.
They did not envisage building a career in a world in which the emerging economies had triggered the creation
of complex global value chains. When they graduated, the EHEA policy frame of learning outcomes, skills
agendas and enterprise education was at its earliest stage of development. The changes that have come
about since then have created a new environment for joint degree designers.
10 “key recommendations” on how to provide students with prerequisites and resources to
increase their “employability”:
1. Learn from different approaches – build up joint solutions
2. Communicate the Erasmus Mundus Brand Name
3. Link Erasmus Mundus Masters Courses and labour markets
4. Deploy professional alliances for academia
5. Give practical learning a place
6. Provide and integrate internships
7. Confidence increases commitment
8. Unfold the impact of internationality
9. Student networks are effective resources
10. Activate complementary abilities
From Erasmus Mundus Thematic Cluster on Employability: Practical guidelines, September 2010 -
October 2011, section 5
commerce with SME membership, local and national policy makers, professional bodies, trade unions,
as well as employers. Advisory boards can also be a rich source of mentors.
• Internships and other forms of work placement, such as volunteering, can be difficult to organise,
particularly for mobile international students. Their timing, level and intensity all pose challenges, as
do questions of supervision, quality and credit-allocation, but when well defined and delivered they
bring substantial added value.
• In an age when professionals can move relatively easily from country to country, career guidance
needs to strengthen its cross-border dimension.
• ‘Jointness’ can be expressed in inter-disciplinarity. This can give graduates greater potential access
to, for example, emerging ‘green’ professions, particularly if the learning and teaching methodology is
problem-based and in a real-world setting.
• Joint degrees have always promised ‘soft skills’ alongside specialist academic competences. These can
be enhanced and given direct application by the stronger participation of students in the management
and quality assurance of the degree.
While there is no counter-factual to reveal the trajectory of what an EMJMD graduate would have achieved
had he or she not enrolled in the programme, the new generation of EMJMDs has sharpened the focus on
competences and employability. Public, private and social enterprises are encouraged to participate. Proposals
are expected to set out the detail of employer involvement and to demonstrate how the EMJMD will foster
entrepreneurship.
Nearly 70% of the EMMC graduates had found a full-time job after their studies, with almost 60%
of those having found one in less than two months after graduating.
Graduate Impact Survey, 2015, EMA
Participants welcomed this policy platform. In order to build on it, they called for longitudinal research, based
on systematic graduate tracking of selected representative cohorts and using official data, EMA surveys,
social media, etc. They also reiterated the oft-repeated cry for employers to be better informed about the
EMJMD action and its excellence. This insistence links with the theme of sustainability and is taken up in a
later section.
These developments led the participants to reflect on the following challenges:
• Many joint degrees are located in research-intensive institutions, which place a strong emphasis on
innovation. Self-employability is as important as employability. With it comes a need for certain skills
to be acquired as adjuncts to the headline discipline: these may include intellectual property rights,
marketing, and specialist IT skills.
• Some element of entrepreneurship or enterprise education is thus desirable across the higher education
curriculum, in proportion and character to each particular discipline. While this is easier to achieve in
higher education cultures already attuned to the employability imperative and in HEIs which have an
entrepreneurial outlook, it is a challenge which faces all EMJMD consortia.
• Advisory boards help ease the tensions which develop between academia and the world of business.
They need to be multi-stakeholder in character and to involve alumni, careers counsellors, chambers of
14 ERASMUS+: CONCLUSIONS OF THE CONFERENCE ON ERASMUS MUNDUS JOINT MASTER DEGREES
ERASMUS+: CONCLUSIONS OF THE CONFERENCE ON ERASMUS MUNDUS JOINT MASTER DEGREES
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